>They not only killed an interesting development environment they also killed a concept.
>
>With VFP a team of 1 developer ;-) could do fantastic apps. MS couldn't compete with hundreds of thousands of teams like that. Because remember MS is also into consulting. So what is the solution to that problem.
>
>You develop an environment where there are so many tools to master that you make A LOT of those 1 developer team disappear.
>
>C#, XAML, Silverlight, WPF, WCF, Entity Framework, ASP.net and the list goes on and on.
>
>Not only that but you also have to be sure to release major versions that will make old stuff obsolete fast. You have to be certain that this way those 1 developer team will be discouraged sooner than later.
>
>Still there must be teams of 1 developer (gifted individuals I could say) still able to build interesting apps fast enough.
>
>I'd be curious to know what is the average size of the teams doing .net work compared to VFP team sizes.

Or, as Joel would say, fire and motion.

The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can't spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don't have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP.